⊕ PSYCHOLOGY |  LOVE 
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Love Realism

How happy we are is to a large extent dependent on whether we judge certain problems to be normal or not. And because our societies have failed to normalise – and speak honestly about – a great many issues in love, it is absurdly easy to believe ourselves uniquely cursed.

24.04.2017
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We expect love to be the source of our greatest joys. But it is – of course – in practice, one of the most reliable routes to misery. Few forms of suffering are ever as intense as those we experience in relationships. Viewed from outside, love could be mistaken for a practice focused almost entirely on the generation of despair.

We should, at least, try to understand our sorrows. Understanding does not magically remove problems, but it sets them in context, reduces our sense of isolation and persecution and helps us to accept that certain griefs are highly normal. The purpose of this essay is to help us develop an emotional skill we term Romantic Realism, defined as a correct awareness of what can legitimately be expected of love and the reasons why we will for large stretches of our lives be very disappointed by it, for no especially sinister or personal reasons.

The problems begin because, despite all the statistics, we are inveterate optimists about how love should go. No amount of information seems able to shake us from our faith in love. A thousand divorces pass our doors; none seem relevant to us.

We see relationship difficulties unfold around us all the time. But we retain a remarkable capacity to discount negative information. Despite the evidence of failures and loneliness, we cling to some highly ambitious background ideas of what relationships should be like – even if we have in reality never seen such unions in train anywhere near us.

The ideal relationship is the equivalent of the snow leopard; our loyalty to it as a realistic possibility cannot be based on the evidence of our own experience. Instead it derives from a range of reckless ideas circulating in our societies about what sharing a life with another person might be like. The problem starts with the wedding. In a wiser world than our own, our marriage vows would set the tone from the outset:

A wedding day signals a commitment by two deeply imperfect people to endure a range of extraordinarily arduous difficulties until the end. It is a vow to be, a lot of the time, pretty unhappy together without blaming one another unfairly. Family and friends gathered will be aware of their own relationship sufferings, will admire the couple’s courage and wish them luck – while worrying (and knowing) all the while that a deeply rocky and in many ways devastating experience lies ahead of the couple.How happy we are is to a large extent dependent on whether we judge certain problems to be normal or not. And because our societies have failed to normalise – and speak honestly about – a great many issues in love, it is absurdly easy to believe ourselves uniquely cursed. We not only feel unhappy; we feel unhappy that we’re unhappy. When difficulties strike, we start to feel we are going out with a particularly cretinous human. The sadness must be someone’s fault: and naturally, enough, we conclude that the blame has to lie with the partner. We avoid the far truer and gentler conclusion: that we are trying to do something very difficult at which almost no one succeeds completely. At an extreme, we exit the relationship far too early. Rather than adjust our ideas of what relationships in general are like, we shift our hopes to new people whom – we ardently trust – won’t suffer any of the irritating problems we experienced with the last partner. We blame our lover in order not to blame love itself, the truer but more elusive target.

We would be wiser to follow Romantic Realism in trusting that love will prove challenging for us not for accidental or unique reasons, but for structural and intractable ones. Paradoxically, Romantic Realism is not the enemy of love; it is one of the attitudes that best contributes to the flourishing and survival of relationships in the long term.

Once we understand the true nature of love, sorrows will move from being symptoms of a personal curse to simply being facts of life. That will already be huge and consoling progress – which this book hopes to hasten.

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